Years ago my centaur’s random course through life
crossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days
– the poet’s daughter & son-in-law – to a reading in London, and went
along, vaguely imagining a brief, small event in a cramped bookshop. Instead a
figure walked sideways into the limelight of the National Theatre with a
modest, self-deprecating smile and proceeded to turn the cavernous space of the
Lyttleton auditorium into an intimate nook in which we joined him on a voyage
of discovery, understanding, memory and passion. Later on, in the bar, he was great company -
& when I mentioned to my friend that I found her dad to be dazzlingly
stimulating and engaging but clearly not a man to tolerate any kind of shit,
she said that I’d got him about right. Learning
that in his study at home in Newcastle he had a small gallery of portraits of
poets that he admired, a few days later I sent him a photograph I’d taken years
earlier in Italy of the death mask of Dante Alighieri. Grainy, grey and with
the shallowest of focus on facial features, it’s one of the very few images I’m
satisfied to have captured. The Italian looks out from blurred death with
lidless eyes, drawn and exhausted by the malaria that probably killed him, transmitting
to us the pain suffered and the wisdom grasped during a journey through and out
of hell. At our next meeting the poet was
kind enough to thank me for the gift. This
was at a meal after a performance of ‘The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus’, a
verse-drama based on a long-lost Sophoclean satyr play, in which he’d mixed
classical scholarship, Victorian colonialism, Greek myth and notions of high
and low culture into a titanic parable of the uses and dangers of art, class, truth
and power. (My abiding memory of that
meal is actually a bawdily low conversation with the costume designer who had given
each of the masked and clog-dancing satyrs of Sophocles’ chorus personality by creating
wildly individual designs for the alarmingly prominent prosthetic penises they
sported).
And some time later, the poet sent me a gift in return
– a signed and dedicated copy of some just-published poems about the Gulf War
of 1991. The cover photograph was an
image straight out of hell – the burnt-to-bits head of an Iraqi soldier killed
by American fire during his retreat from Kuwait. (The picture is well-known in the UK, but never
seen in the USA according to American friends).
In ‘A Cold Coming’, the poet imagines meeting the dead Iraqi, being
upbraided by him for shirking the poet’s responsibility to tell the truth, and
then going on to hear his story and that of the three American soldiers who
killed him. It’s a chilling, terrifying
tale of an individual life snuffed out by forces utterly beyond its
control. And it takes as its departure
not just Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – to which it was compared at the
time – but Dante’s incontro with Virgil at the gate of hell, and then
reaches further down to Homer’s account of the chthonic world where you
encounter the spirits of the unappeasable dead, and if you’re lucky or know the
right words, you might just placate them for as long as it takes you to speak.
And this poem was published on the news
pages – not the culture section or entertainment supplement, please note – of a national newspaper. It’s difficult now to imagine, in our world
of enshittified social media, that a poet can command that size of readership
and speak with that sort of moral seriousness in a form that’s accessible and
in language that scintillates with intellect, humanity, erudition and
compassion, via such a channel (The Guardian, as it happens). But Tony
Harrison did so, and gave us strength and understanding in the face of
evil.
But we live in diminished times, and a time diminished
still further by his passing. Where now
the scholarship, the wit, the intelligence, the compassion, the
bursting-with-relish-and-energy language, the profound learning (much Latin and
more Greek), the wisdom, the utter commitment to telling the truth about our
condition?
I weep for Tony Harrison - he is dead. His words shine
back to us across the void and the gathering years, and will illuminate every
one of our tomorrows.